The Western Hemisphere After Trump

The radical swings in the foreign policy of the Trump administration—on issues from Ukraine to Iran—make it difficult for commentators to describe it as they would the policy of a typical president. However, some have made the effort to not only assign some guiding principles to the policy, but even defend it. Two such intrepid souls are Ryan C. Berg and Joseph Ledford. Writing for Foreign Policy, they argued at the end of last year that “Trump’s Western Hemisphere Pivot Is Real,” and that “The Trump administration’s strategic pivot aims to rebuild the foundational source of U.S. global power—a prosperous, economically integrated, and secure hemisphere.” 

“Real” of course is a relative term, so it’s difficult to argue about—though starting a months-long war with Iran, along with bombing campaigns in Nigeria, Yemen, and elsewhere, suggests that perhaps the pivot to the Western Hemisphere is, to put it generously, incomplete. But setting aside the reality of the pivot, the question of developing a “prosperous, economically integrated, and secure hemisphere” is worth discussing. While the goal itself is a laudable one, the US seems to be rapidly undermining any chances of its success. 

Why bother with integration? 

Hemispheric integration is desirable for several reasons. One is simply scale. The United States has barely a fourth the population of China, and has maintained an economic edge largely through the immense wealth of its markets. However, as China increases its per capita wealth, as well as its connectedness to the rest of Asia through its Belt and Road initiative, it will increasingly be able to out-produce American industries through the sheer number of factories, markets, universities, and other resources available there. An economically integrated Western Hemisphere would allow American (in the continental sense of the term) firms new opportunities to specialize and scale up, and thus give American economies a better chance of continuing to grow into the 21st century. 

While the advent of jetliners and container ships has diminished the importance of physical distance in global trade, it has not eliminated the consideration of space altogether. The North American continent has essentially continuous megalopolises that span US borders both north and south—agglomerations like Detroit-Windsor, Tijuana-San Diego, or El Paso-Ciudad Juarez are artificially cut by national borders. No number of airline flights can bring New York and London as close together in terms of trade and travel as these neighboring cities. This is why, despite China’s much larger economy, Canada and Mexico remain the largest trading partners of the US. More distant states in the Americas do not have this advantage to the same degree, but their trade patterns still reflect this proximity—most of Central America and the Caribbean still counts the US as its largest trading partner, even as China becomes more prominent. 

Beyond economic growth, a major goal of broad regional integration is setting a floor for human rights and political freedom. While the hope would be for those standards to be as close to global as possible, the stability and human rights of countries in our hemisphere are more pressing for reasons beyond the humanitarian. The Venezuelan refugee crisis—a result of that country’s authoritarian governance and catastrophic economic mismanagement—destabilized politics across the region, including but not only in the US. Greater hemispheric integration would hopefully reduce the number of individuals in need of foreign refuge while allowing easier formal migration—and thus, economic self-sufficiency—for those who do want to come to the US. 

Finally, the strategic advantage to physical proximity grows as the dominance of the US Navy wanes. The current inability of the US to maintain open sea routes in the Persian Gulf and Red Seas has become glaringly obvious. In the event of a conflict between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China, it would strain or simply surpass the capacity of the US Navy to keep the sea lanes from Taiwan to California open. Indeed, as Chinese missile capacity grows, the same is likely to be true for Japan and South Korea. Taiwanese microchips, South Korean heavy machinery, Japanese cars—all might be cut off in the event of a Chinese move against Taiwan.

On the other hand, the calculus reverses in the Americas. Land routes between the US, Canada, and Mexico are not susceptible to such disruption. The Gulf of Mexico and the coasts of the Americas are much easier to secure, and much more difficult for a potential enemy to disrupt. An integrated economy that relies on Venezuelan oil, Mexican microchips, and Brazilian machine parts would be much more resilient in the event of conflicts that disrupt global trade. 

Going in the wrong direction

Berg and Ledford—as well as Donald Trump himself—frequently invoke the history of the Monroe Doctrine, under which the US warned European states not to re-colonize the recently independent republics of the Americas. However, neither Monroe nor the presidents who followed managed to build a friendly relationship with those states. Instead, US goals—from Manifest Destiny expansionism to the Gilded Age demand for access to cheap resources to the perceived need to steer countries towards capitalism during the Cold War—have almost always been prioritized over relationships of mutual respect. 

Perhaps the only major exception was Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which succeeded not only in improving relations but in rallying most Latin American countries to formally declare war on the Axis powers during the Second World War. As a result, Brazil and Mexico sent pilots and ground troops, respectively, to a war to which they were only obliquely connected.But the Cold War, and especially US responses to leftist leaders like Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, put an end to this policy. 

The extent to which it is possible to get back on that neighborly track, given the internal politics in the US and the massive power and wealth disparity between the US and the next-largest economies in the hemisphere, is an open question. But if that is the goal, the United States is pursuing it all wrong. 

First, the US is undercutting the trust that would allow for true hemispheric integration. France, Italy, and other European states were willing to enter into a continental union with Germany only because Germany was substantially demilitarized and posed little physical threat to them. This of course is not true of the United States. Instead, hemispheric integration would depend on other nations’ trust that we have no malign intentions towards them. However, the recent ‘arrest’ of Nicolas Maduro, in which dozens of people were killed in a military operation, certainly makes that a difficult claim to maintain. The same can be said for killing hundreds of people in the name of combating the drug trade in Operation Southern Spear. And the same can be said for the devastating naval blockade of Cuba. 

These operations mean that Latin American states must worry first and foremost about their sovereignty and resist any agreement, even those that might be mutually beneficial, that might sacrifice sovereignty. This is true even of our demilitarized northern border. By continuing to meet with Albertan separatists, the US is signalling that it does not respect Canadian sovereignty—to which the only reasonable Canadian response is to be ever more protective of that sovereignty. 

Other US policies have proactively driven the continent away from integration. Relevantly, the EU began as a tariff union: a bloc of countries that agree not to set tariffs on one another’s goods, for the purposes of building an integrated and efficient market. Trump’s policy has been of course the opposite. He has raised tariffs on countries around the world, and indeed particularly targeted our closest trading partners, Canada and Mexico. Beyond trade in goods, the EU has become steadily more integrated by allowing workers to move between countries, meeting local labor needs and further stitching together economies across the continent. The US is instead deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Americas and reducing its workforce from other countries on the continent. 

Distance services like trucking benefit particularly from international integration. The EU and the Schengen free movement region have been seeking to reduce international barriers to provide more integrated logistics. By contrast, the US has been cracking down on foreign national truck drivers, who in theory are allowed to bring goods across the border but cannot move goods from point to point within the US. The US almost seems determined to avoid any of the mutual economic benefits that could occur from lowering barriers of this kind. 

The external challenges Forward

True hemispheric integration will need to start with the components that made European integration possible: first, trust in the security situation; then, mutually beneficial trade agreements; and finally, the establishment of free trade and movement between countries in the hemisphere. This is only plausible if the benefits are shared, and if the rest of the hemisphere is able to see those benefits clearly as outweighing the dangers the US poses. 

None of these are possible under the current administration, given the operation against Maduro, Operation Southern Spear, and the ongoing blockade of Cuba. The next president will need to work first to restore trust that the US military is not aimed at our southern neighbors. This will likely require the United States to sign the sorts of binding agreements on the use of military force that it has forever been loath to do. But formalizing these commitments would be beneficial to all parties. Latin American and Caribbean leaders especially would have something to show their electorates, which are understandably suspicious of US intentions on their sovereignty. 

In terms of establishing mutually beneficial economic arrangements, it’s obvious that many businesses and individuals have benefitted from free trade agreements like NAFTA—even if the agreement has created losers as well as winners. Nonetheless, the current administration has opted to start the process of drawing down US participation in the USMCA, NAFTA’s Trump-negotiated replacement. Reversing that step will be a critical first one in achieving hemispheric cooperation, and one likely to be welcomed by US neighbors. Canadian and Mexican businesses rely on predictable tariffs and a process for resolving disputes that is more robust than the President’s mood on a particular night. While Canadians have made much of their resolve to resist US abuses, their economy has suffered in wake of Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs. Canadians are unlikely to go back to trusting the US immediately, but if an improved trade environment can aid their economic recovery it will set future relations on a better foundation. 

For other countries, especially middle- or lower-income economies, more than free trade will be necessary to make integration attractive. Here, the US would be wise to lean on another tactic used in Europe—subsidies for lower-income states in the bloc. States like Poland have benefitted from coordinated EU investment, with billions of euros directed into that country alone. These investments do not just build closer relationships between European states, however. They also build up the infrastructure and physical and human capital in lower-income EU countries, improving the economic capacity and overall productivity of the whole continent. As Poland has grown wealthier, it has become both an important source of skilled labor and key market for more established European manufacturing states. Mexico, Colombia, and other middle-income Latin American states have the same potential—and subsidies that help keep national budgets afloat would create a powerful incentive for even skeptical governments to think twice before abandoning the project, much as Poland and Hungary never seriously considered leaving the EU even when their governments had serious ideological objections to it. 

Subsidies from wealthier to less wealthy countries in the hemisphere would be particularly valuable, as many large Latin American economies like Brazil and Argentina carry high rates of sovereign debt, making government borrowing a more difficult prospect. Direct, targeted subsidies could finance the sort of projects often financed by borrowing, but without the need for later repayment. 

Finally, and most ambitiously, integration means hemispheric freedom of movement. It feels almost absurd to even type the words, but it should be a continental goal to allow tourists, customers, students, families, and, yes, workers from the various countries in our hemisphere to travel, live, and work where they want. In the EU, this took decades, and in our own hemisphere it will likely take as long. But the goal is also worth it. Tremendous amounts of human effort are wasted in the process of visa applications and waitlists, irregular migration, painful deportations, and other efforts at enforcing and getting around arduous border policies. Freedom of movement would allow workers to seek the best jobs available for them, and free companies not just in the US but in the other American countries to draw from a broader talent pool. This would improve efficiencies all around, but perhaps most notably in smaller countries.  It would also benefit university systems and cultural institutions, not to mention families currently separated by borders. All of these benefits, once realized, would create constituencies in each country that would discourage backsliding. 

Can it all be done politically?

In addition to the difficult work of building up trust with North American trading partners who have been burned by the current administration, any effort towards hemispheric integration would have to overcome substantial political challenges in the United States. The last ten years have been marked by a shift towards a nativist, protectionist mood. Trump has certainly contributed to this mood, but cannot be said to have originated it altogether.  

Predicting how long this trend will last is likely impossible, but there are some reasons for hope. For one thing, a backlash to Trump’s administration is growing politically. The manufacturing jobs that were supposed to come about due to increased tariffs have not materialized, and cost of living issues continue to plague the economy. Even on thorny issues of freedom of movement, US voters are coming to recognize the draconian measures and economic pain required to zealously enforce the current immigration laws—potentially creating an opening for  reforming them.

 Republicans are unlikely to give up on building both metaphorical and physical walls, but they are also unlikely to maintain their current dominance. And on the other end of the political spectrum, younger cohorts of left-leaning voters, the kind that have driven recent victories by Democratic Socialists of America candidates, are more in favor of freedom of movement (the most difficult part of an integration policy), with the DSA platform rather ambitiously proposing to “legalize migration, grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, provide a path to citizenship for all permanent residents, and end visa caps and quotas.” 

Of course, a few Republican losses and DSA wins is not enough to shift the US political system much immediately. Looking once again at Europe, it’s important to remember that the integration process there took decades—and still it faces substantial internal opposition. But the process starts with setting a transnational goal and building a political and cultural movement dedicated to taking steps down a generations-long path. Fortunately, the first of those steps require only  to reverse some executive orders, which are unbacked by any legislation and were signed by the least popular president since the beginning of modern polling. Re-entering the USMCA/NAFTA, streamlining cross border trade, and pulling back ICE and the Border Patrol (with the eventual legislative goal of reorganizing them entirely) can all be done quickly by a Democratic president in 2029. But then will come the longer process of helping US voters think of themselves as inhabitants of a hemisphere as well as a country.

As of this writing, the US is engaged in a brutal air war against Iran, and debating entering further conflicts in Africa. A very real pivot to the Americas seems unlikely in the near future. However, pursued by the appropriate means—regional security, economic integration and investment, and freedom of movement—such a policy of integration, pursued by a different president and maintained over a generation, should be a long term goal in the long process of rebuilding American diplomatic and economic potential that will follow this administration. 

Featured Image is Cumbre de Líderes de América del Norte 2016, from Presidencia de la República Mexicana